Students' Performances on Standardized Tests Secondary to Their Work in Classrooms, Says Administrator

Parents should focus on the individual achievements of their children and not the results of standardized tests administered as a component of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, says Collingswood Curriculum Director Thomas Anderson, Ph.D.

Collingswood Patch consulted Anderson for his take on the results of the 2011 ASK (Assessment of Skills and Knowledge) and HSPA (High School Proficiency Assessment) public school examinations, which were released last week.

The tests, which assess “proficiency” in math and language arts, have limited instructional value and can invite any number of flawed comparisons, Anderson said.

“You have to be careful of these one-shot assessments,” Anderson said. “We probably have more variability than many districts because we bring in kids from all over. We have many different types of children.”

At the state level, acting Department of Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf said the test results describe “a persistent achievement gap that leaves our economically disadvantaged, African-American and Hispanic students far behind their peers.

“We must be honest with ourselves and our communities about this achievement gap, and be impatient and relentless in doing everything we can to close it once and for all,” Cerf said.

However, Anderson says any “gap” in test scores would be measured more meaningfully in terms of economics.

“We have a wide variety of incomes in this state,” Anderson said. “Children from impoverished backgrounds do worse. To couch it in racial terms is highly inflammatory.”

According to Anderson, the Collingswood school district has “a great variability in achievement levels because we don’t group our students by ability.”

Furthermore, he says, year-over-year comparisons of the test results are counterintuitive because they judge current-year students against those in prior classes instead of seeing whether the same groups of children improved over time.

In general, Anderson said, “New Jersey does very well on most standardized tests.”

Parents should be more concerned with the efforts of the district to improve its students’ writing and reading comprehension skills, Anderson said. Collingswood is currently two years into a best-practices curriculum that greatly increases the number of books children read at a level appropriate to their comprehension.

“We’re seeing more books taken out of the library, more books being read at home,” Anderson said. “Kids come to us in high school and say, anecdotally, that they’ve never read so much in their lives.”

Establishing a vigorous program that includes supplemental, non-textbook reading in history and science classes is a critical step in preparing students to become college-ready writers, Anderson said.

“I think in writing, kids are used to texting, and texting is not writing for an academic and business environment,” he said. “A lot of your internet work is very superficial writing and very superficial reading.”

Collingswood's results are reflected in the charts below. Click here to see full reports from the state.

 Additional reporting by Douglas Bergen.